The Less Annoying Future of Google Glass

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, at a 2012 developer conference.

Kimihiro Hoshino / AFP / Getty

In April, 2012, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, showed up at a charity event in San Francisco wearing a pair of glasses with a futuristic-looking device affixed to the corner of one of the lenses. Robert Scoble, a Silicon Valley man-about-town, ran into him at the event and, seeing what Brin wore, snapped a photo and put it online, along with a breathless post describing “a bluish light flashing off of his”—Brin’s—“right eyeball.” Brin was, of course, wearing an early prototype of Google Glass, a computerized device that could be worn like a pair of glasses and had a display that you could see out of the corner of your eye. The company had recently announced the Glass project, but it hadn’t yet shown a prototype to the public.

It’s only a slight overstatement to call Scoble’s account the high point in public relations for Google Glass. The device (or the idea of it, at any rate) got some positive attention early on—for instance, when Sebastian Thrun, who founded the Google X research unit that developed Google Glass, wore a pair during an interview with Charlie Rose, describing his aspirations for a technology that would make personal interaction more fulfilling. (An early concept video shows a Glass wearer looking out the window and seeing a weather alert. Later, walking toward a subway station, he sees a notification that service has been suspended.) But, for the most part, the Glass stories that have most captivated the masses have been about how irritating and tiresome they—and the people who wear them—can be. By January, 2013, Ryan Lawler, of the blog TechCrunch, had coined the term “glasshole” to describe the device’s early adopters (mostly Google employees and software developers). Later that year, in this magazine, Gary Shteyngart recounted his experience trying out a pair. “After a full day of Glassing, of constantly moving my eye up and down as if in preparation for the bifocals I will need when I’m older, I fall into bed exhausted,” he wrote. “The Simpsons” parodied the glasses, and Jon Stewart skewered their wearers. The device also incited a minor brawl in San Francisco, after a woman showed up at a bar wearing a pair and so perturbed the patrons that one of them yanked them from her face. (People, by and large, sided with the yanker.) Software developers, meanwhile, were bothered by short-lived batteries and other hardware problems, as well as by a restriction that Google placed on their ability to earn money from applications that they developed for the headset.

Amid all these problems, the promised introduction of a consumer version of Glass has been continually pushed back. Last year, one of the architects of Google Glass, Babak Parviz, left for Amazon, and a lead engineer, Adrian Wong, defected to Oculus. It got to the point that people, even some early Glass evangelists, assumed that the great experiment was over. On Thursday, Google announced as much—but not in the way that people had expected. Instead of killing Glass, or letting it die a quiet death, Google will bring the device out of the Google X research division and create a standalone division for it, overseen by a high-profile executive named Tony Fadell, who once led Apple’s iPod division and later co-founded a startup called Nest that Google acquired. Sales of the test device will end this month, while the company works on a version that can be sold to consumers, presumably at a more affordable price.

“It didn’t seem like the direction they were heading—it seemed like they were heading away from Glass as a product,” Sterling Udell, a software developer who wrote a blog post, in November, proclaiming the death of Glass, told me. Udell has been developing apps for Google’s Android platform for years, and early on, when the company started inviting developers to create apps for Glass, he was intrigued. But the experience didn’t go well for him, partly because Google’s approval process dragged on for months, and partly because the company didn’t allow developers to charge fees for their apps or run advertising on them. “To be honest, I couldn’t afford to keep developing for a platform that had no income potential,” he told me.

Other developers lost interest for different reasons. Bill Kouretsos, the technical director of a game-development firm in Toronto, Little Guy Games, spent several months, starting in late 2013, trying to adapt a mobile game to Glass. The result was a duelling game called Little Bandits in which you controlled your character by moving your head. But, Kouretsos said, the game didn’t end up being any fun. “When you’re standing on the subway and looking around in space, you look pretty weird playing the game, and you’re not going to play it,” he said. “Or, if you’re walking down the street, you’re going to hit a lamppost.”

Last year, Google made a test version of Glass publicly available for fifteen hundred dollars a pair, without ever officially launching it as a product. But, given the device’s high price and poor reputation, Glass hasn’t become anywhere near mainstream. Google’s usual approach, which is to release products early to a limited number of users, has served the company well with many of its Web-based services, among them Gmail, which the company kept in a beta, or test, version for years, even after it had become hugely popular. Google argues that the long-running test of Glass also served that purpose, but the claim is at best an overstatement; comments over the years from the company’s own executives indicate that they had hoped to begin selling a consumer version of Glass long ago. By moving Glass to a division of its own, overseen by Fadell, Google is signalling that it still hopes to make the product work. “We’re continuing to build for the future, and you’ll start to see future versions of Glass when they’re ready,” the company said in a blog post announcing the closure of the experimental phase.

Thrun, the Google X founder, left the company last year. I spoke to him on Thursday, and he told me that he feels the test phase provided several useful lessons. For example, he initially thought people would wear Glass all the time and use it to enhance many aspects of daily life. “The ambition that I set for the team was, ‘Let’s make something you can wear all day, almost like a piece of clothing or a piece of jewelry,’ ” he recalled. That turned out to be the wrong approach. In his experience, he said, Glass was most useful during physical activities that kept his hands too occupied to handle a phone—skiing, biking, playing with his children. Sometimes he got a kick out of using Glass to record those activities and share them. But, he said, “I just don’t wear it at the dinner table, I don’t wear it in the office, I don’t wear it in conversation with people.” He felt that wearing Glass made face-to-face interactions worse, and he was sensitive to other people’s concerns about being spied on or surveilled by a video-recording feature on the device. And, of course, he and his colleagues were aware that the device was being mocked as uncool.

Thrun said that he is hopeful that Fadell will use the feedback to turn Glass into a viable product. (One area where Google had some success with it was in professional applications, like doctors using Glass to record surgeries for training purposes.) While he hasn’t been involved for several months and said that he couldn’t comment on Google’s current plans, he envisions a consumer version of Google Glass that would address concerns about privacy and functionality while also incorporating some of the lessons about how people actually use the device. One can imagine Google pursuing a more modest product—or set of products—that would incorporate the most useful features of Glass, like recording video or facilitating hands-free calls or text messages, instead of assuming that people will wear Glass all the time for the virtual dimension that it brings to their lives.

Thrun, who is also a professor and a researcher of artificial intelligence (he was heavily involved in Google’s development of self-driving cars), may have been the right person to put in charge of Glass when Google first started working on it and it still seemed like something out of science fiction. To turn Glass into a product that people will use often, Fadell is a more obvious choice. “Tony has a track record of really manufacturing products,” Thrun said. “I admit that I, at Google X, did not have the same experience that Tony has in that space. I have much more experience with innovative moon shots.”